Street Stories: The World of Police Detectives

by Robert Jackall

Book Overview

Detectives work the streets - an arena of action, vice, lust, greed, aggression, and violence - to gather shards of information about who did what to whom. They also work the cumbersome machinery of the justice system - semi-military police hierarchies with their endless jockeying for prestige, procedure-driven district attorney offices, and backlogged courts - transforming hardwon street knowledge into public narratives of responsibility for crime...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674017099
• ISBN13: 9780674017092
• Release Date: April 2005
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 429 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 5.9" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

The Forest and The Trees

This is an impressive book. By and large I've found books about police are written in a positive but unintellectual style. The authors retell the stories as told by the officers but don't add much in the telling. Jackall essentializes the stories in a style that in itself would make him a good storyteller but goes a step farther. He weaves these stories into a historical background of the police departments and the culture in which the detectives exist. As a result, Jackall smoothly shifts between well told close-ups of particular characters, and fascinating wide angle views of the history and organizational culture the subjects function within.